This image taken in April 2016 showcases the bulging heart of the Milky Way as it hangs over the Chajnantor plateau. Located in the Atacama Desert of Chile, this plateau is one of the highest and driest places on Earth. This combination results in ideal conditions to observe millimetre and submillimetre radiation from space, which…
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Enjoy the views of the sky over legendary Alain Maury’s Astrofarm, which is located in the heart of the Chilean Atacama Desert, nearby San Pedro de Atacama. Any visitor who comes always gets literally close to the stars as high ladders are needed for huge telescopes for public observations. I was lucky to visit this…
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The Atacama Desert is just full of magic and unprecedented creation. In this image, taken a month ago, I found an unnamed geological creation dozens of kilometers southward of the famous Valle de la Luna National Park, which was formed by the sequential folding of an old salt lake that eventually dried and was forced…
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On May 15-16, 2022, a total lunar eclipse occurred, visible primarily over western Europe and the Americas. Located in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, I had a truly spectacular view of this particular phenomenon nearby the center of the Milky Way in the dark skies (and almost in zenith). Thus it was well possible to…
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Using a digital scan of the 1919 eclipse from one copy of a plate from Sobral from Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Königstuhl, who scanned theirs as part of the Heidelberg Digitized Astronomical Plates (HDAP) project funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation, it was possible to reconstruct the solar corona and also structures of the huge prominence of this…
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Based on ESO La Silla Observatory, the three beehive-shaped domes hide 0.6-m telescopes called ExTrA (short for Exoplanets in Transits and their Atmospheres), which are from 2017 active instruments for study the structure and composition of Earth-sized worlds, and address some fundamental questions about planets in our Galaxy. The Galaxy we see just over the…
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The giant dome of one of the 4 VLT telescopes ESO Paranal Observatory in Chile is “leaning” towards space due to the perspective. It hides a telescope with a mirror diameter of 8.2 meters – one of the largest telescopes in the world! Next to the dome is the supporting Auxiliary Telescope AT1, whose mirror…
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